The Attachment Page 9

  When you make contact with that number of people then the stories begin to flow—a mother has just died overseas; a child has been diagnosed with leukaemia; a marriage has broken up; another couple want to arrange a wedding. As I get older, I try to hold Sunday afternoon to be quiet and people-free. Sometimes it works!

  Now. Here’s the plan.

  I can pick you up at the exit at Redfern station at 11 am Saturday (or any time earlier, say 10.30 if that suits—but I’m really just being greedy).

  How does that sound?

  Tony

  Hi Tony,

  Be greedy! I’m completely thrilled that it has worked out for us to have time. The more the better—and hopefully merrier. Though I’ll try not to suck up too much of your oxygen before that busy Sunday of yours.

  It seems mad for you to come to Redfern. I can easily take the train from Lewisham to the city, then swap to the Eastern Suburbs line and alight at Edgecliff. Wouldn’t that be easier? What say you, dear local?

  Ailsa

  OK, Edgecliff sounds good.

  Why are you so much smarter than a burnt out parish priest?

  See you under a big tree.

  Antonio

  Querido Antonio.

  You are not burnt out and you have strict instructions not to get burnt out. We have a camino to walk! Just make sure your mobile is on. I’ve seen you in digital action and it’s not reassuring.

  Ailsa

  Me again, Tony.

  Amazing to think it is only a week since our talk in the bookroom. To me it feels like about ten lifetimes. It must be even more pronounced for you. I can’t imagine how things are in your community with the abuse revelations, but I’m guessing you will be doing a lot of comforting. A wedding will be good this weekend, I imagine. Some optimism and promise?

  Anyway, I wanted to say I’m thinking of you and hoping the days are not too hard. Also to say I’m glad to be seeing you again so soon.

  Until Saturday. Keep well—on all levels.

  Ailsa

  Damn it woman. We’re doing it again.

  Emails passing in cyberspace. Yours arrived just as I was about to press send.

  Sure you are not a Celtic witch?

  Anyway, here goes . . .

  Ailsa,

  The only reason to send you these reflections when I will see you on Saturday is that I need to put some of it down in note form. Also, let’s be frank, I might forget to tell you some of these things. You’re dealing with some sort of major eccentric here, y’know.

  So, to the week that was . . .

  Wednesday night last. Loved it. Sitting up on those stools and chatting so comfortably. Being intoxicated once again by the road and its memories. My intoxication fuelled by the lightness and yet intensity of your prose, but this time brought to another level by your reading of it.

  All of these feelings being torn open and nerves exposed by the terrible realities of the abuse of children. And yet the fun and memories of the road were strangely undiminished. And finally my enthusiastic public promise: ‘And damn it I’ll walk the Camino again.’ No need to hit the alcohol or drugs for me to get high.

  Then the afterparty. And you saying to me (in the same intoxicated state, I believe), ‘Let’s do the Camino together.’ You may have noticed I just managed to maintain sufficient control of the seventeen-year-old adolescent who wears the disguise of mature aged cleric and my hasty and enthusiastic tongue—not to reply. Then to have the night capped off by your astonishing gift and note. Your treasured shell.

  Which brings me to the point. Opening the box to proudly show to my hosts, I was visited by disaster. It slipped out of my fingers and fell on the wooden floor AND BROKE. The shell you safely carried from Finisterre to the plane, from the plane to your home, cherished for two years, and then gave to this clumsy pilgrim, fell to the ground and broke. My overloaded emotional system was hit as if by 240 volts of electricity. I stared at the pieces on the floor, aghast.

  The good news is that it has been restored to almost unrecognisable wholeness with the care of a watch-maker and the judicious use of Araldite by my wonderful hostess.

  How can I tell Ailsa, the truth-teller? The coward’s way—email.

  When facing crises like this I regularly turn to metaphor.

  The delicately beautiful shell—is your story, your grace and curiosity, the written word of the book, the love affair with walking, the life-giving friendship you offer us dusty fellow pilgrims.

  The disaster—is the brick wall of horror of the abuse and the deep wounding of the innocent, the smashing of lives. The waters of sin that threaten to drown us.

  The reconstruction—the fragile possibility of reconciliation, of putting lives together, the healing power of stories, the surprising mystery of strangers we meet on the way.

  I don’t know whether it works for you, but it seems to take some of the sting out of it for me.

  Thursday night. Spoke to about two hundred people in Albury. Made a similar statement to the night before. The topic was the possibility of connections that a community of faith offers us, and which we often fail to recognise. The audience was kind. Led to intelligent and worthwhile discussion.

  Friday morning. Came home a little stretched. Had a meeting of six of my colleagues, all good men, equally flattened by the week’s headlines. All dealing with it in their own different ways. Paso a paso.

  Friday afternoon. Out of the blue I get a phone call from an Italian woman. I can hardly make out what she wants—but she needs to come and see me at 5 pm. Of all times, of all weeks, of all days it turned out to be a party of wild Italians from Bolzano, one of whom I had met on the Camino at Ponferrada three years ago. The afternoon turned into another extravagant refugio experience. Lucio Perenzoni from Salerno and five of his amici, out in Oz observing the eclipse of the sun in Cairns. No English. My Italian disappears when not in use for any length of time. So it’s all mime, huge hugs, high fives, immense smiles, laughing without reason, talking extra loudly. Sentences of one word. Either Latin, Italian or something I’ve heard in the movies. Lots of photos. It goes on for an hour and a half. They leave yahooing, much tooting of the taxi horns. Passers-by think I have just been married but they can see no bride.

  Later that night—a fiftieth birthday, full of loud music and thin conversation. I leave at 1 am to find my car battery flat—or is it my battery.

  An incredible week comes to an end.

  Gracias a la vida.

  Tony

  Dear Tony,

  What highs and lows. I’m very relieved there were highs. And the Camino rescued you of course—those mad Italians. They are infectious in that fizzing state. I know it well. Italy was my first love. My first trip outside of Australia. I’ll never get that curious mix of homecoming and unfamiliarity again—although funnily enough, that’s how I felt when I met you, now I think about it. Anyway, I experience a shimmer of that initial visit to the northern hemisphere whenever I speak Italian, or listen to them bubbling. How kind that they descended on you. You were healed by the Camino—or am I projecting for my own reasons!

  The shell . . .

  Your metaphorical reading of its journey will always be there now, when you see it. That visceral experience of the day, the week, the breaking open.

  Before reading your interpretation, I’d formulated a version of the significance of the smashed shell—clearly, I thought, we have to walk to Finisterre so you can get a replacement!

  As to me being a witch—which you have asked several times, I note . . .

  That word has had a very bad rap. Did you know that it was originally applied to both men and women? These days it is either a sexy young thing or a hag on a broomstick—kind of a broad-strokes distillation of the way much of our culture wants to portray women. I don’t know anything about the practices of Wicca, but I suspect many people who are drawn to it would be offended by society’s overwhelming view that ‘witch’ is somehow associated with malevolence or darkness.
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  I don’t get the sense you are using it that way. Quite the opposite. I rather suspect you’re revealing your fascination with all things Celtic. Regardless, I will take it as a compliment, and claim a little witchiness for myself. I actually love the word ‘crone’. I often use it of myself, and people are horrified. To me it’s almost an aspiration—the wise woman who retreats to the cave. And do you know, it has the same derivation as ‘crown’ which makes me think it was a word for a priestess? Take care or I might move into your territory, Monsignor!

  I’m glad you are pieced together like the shell after such a time of breakage. All shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well . . .

  Ain’t it the truth—given time?

  Ailsa

  Compañero!

  I dreamed about the shell overnight. Do you recall I decided to give you the perfect one and to keep the chipped one for myself. Did I tell you that? Well, now we both have fault lines! There’s something in that for me to understand. Something about allowing everyone to be broken. Not projecting perfection onto those I care about and admire, because it’s an impossible burden for them to bear.

  How a metaphor opens the world.

  A

  A

  Some singer or other talked about the light coming through the fault lines. I like that. This search for perfection—I got over it years ago. I’m happy with the cracks.

  I like Saturdays, and this one promises to be no exception.

  T

  DEAR READER ,

  The distance from Melbourne to Sydney is roughly a thousand kilometres. For my Shanachie friend, that’s little more than a stroll!

  I often feel an urge to explore why Ailsa is such an incessant walker. Walking surely is an exercise that demands little justification. The natural movement of a healthy human body. Fresh air, stretching legs, breathing deeply—all worthy activities that make good sense. But walking 1300 kilometres, alone, through flooded rivers and icy weather while carrying all your possessions in a heavy backpack from one end of Spain to the other—now that IS a question that invites some serious discussion.

  Why do we do what we do?

  For me, an endlessly intriguing question. It pointed me toward reading psychology. What really makes me tick? It had me looking carefully at the stories of my own parents, their parents and their parents’ parents—as far as I could dig. Maybe I could find clues there.

  As you’ve already heard, about 30 years ago I stumbled on the story of my own Irish background, which has shone a partial light on some of my choices. So I was delighted when, in a quick aside, Ailsa told me the intriguing story of her great-great-grandfather John Bernard’s multiple journeys from Fremantle to the Gascoyne—a distance of 1200 kilometres. No trains, no boats—simply hard slog.

  The story in a nutshell . . .

  Irish-born Bernard Fitzpatrick arrived in 1851 to start a new life in Australia. Thirty-one years later his son, John Bernard, set out from Fremantle on a highly ambitious journey to stake a claim in the red dust of the Gascoyne plains of Western Australia. The motivation for this journey is not hard to find—the irresistible lure of land, vast tracts of land, that drove new settlers, particularly the Irish and the Scots, to set out with only a pack full of hopes, into the hinterland of this immense continent.

  The terrain must have appeared incredibly harsh to his Celtic eyes. But he stayed. Not before, however, returning to Perth to formalise his claim, then retracing his steps back to the Gascoyne where he’d spend two years alone readying the property. Then, finally, he trekked south again to collect his wife and six children, his goods and chattels, to bring them at last to their new home.

  John Bernard was already a prodigious traveller who had crossed from the UK to Australia three times in a sailing ship before he was twenty. We are talking about a man who, beyond any shadow of doubt, was a restless pilgrim. But here is the fascinating parallel—that journey to the north was roughly the same distance that Ailsa would walk from the south to the north of Spain, over a hundred years later. Don’t tell me that genes have got nothing to do with it.

  Wrinkles are hereditary. You get them from your kids—so goes the old saying. Our inheritance, our personal history and our genes, I am convinced, play a significant part in the way we look at the world, the choices we make, the friendships we fashion, our patterns of health and wellbeing, even the journeys we embark on. Which brings me back to the not surprising insight into what drives this contemporary restless pilgrim who carries the genes of her ancestors and their epic journeys as they built a future in the timeless spaces of North Western Australia.

  The Gascoyne would be the desert in which the infant Ailsa would take her first steps.

  Tony

  Buenos dias, Antonio!

  I’ve had a great Sydney visit. Rich encounters and wonderful conversations.

  None more so than ours. Didn’t we roam!

  Hope your Sunday is full-fill-ing.

  Thank you again for great gifts. I’m glad I can now picture where you will be reading this. Next time you visit Melbourne I will show you my office eyrie!

  Gracias. Always gracias, compañero.

  Ailsa

  Ailsa,

  You never told me what compañero means to you. For me, it’s one with whom you break bread, with whom you break open your life.

  One of the many little corners we failed to explore.

  Been thinking about your jokey use of the label ‘blonde’, and how I said I didn’t like you using it, even in jest. It diminishes you, as most labels do. I have to tell you I’m actually not too keen on them. Comes from my constant irritation at people seeing me simply as ‘priest’ and then quickly drawing all sorts of false assumptions about what I believe, what are my values and opinions about all manner of things. Their suppositions are consistently wide of the mark. Gives me the irrits.

  When you tell me you are ‘blonde’ I think you’re saying you embrace innocence, don’t want to be seen as an expert, or having the last word—easier to be the person who is not afraid to ask the ‘dumb’ question, which is the one everyone else is wanting to ask. I get that. Let me tell you, however, my feisty sister Susie is a blonde and she wouldn’t fail to cut me to pieces if I attempted blonde jokes with her. Here endeth the second sermon on the matter.

  Fancy me forgetting I had that baptism date on Saturday and losing those precious conversation minutes. Must confess that it is far from unusual for me to double book, even triple book myself. I should wear a health warning on a T-shirt perhaps—‘man out of control’.

  When I get excited like this, I have to remind myself of a theory of group dynamics I once learned. It talks about three stages within the pattern of most relationships: ‘enchantment’, followed by ‘necessary disenchantment’, before coming to ‘mature consolidation’. If that is simply gobbledegook to you remind me to talk about it some fine day.

  Whatever about all of that, I think we are in the good times at the moment. We might be heading for stage two. Look out.

  One sobering thought niggles at me—your generous openness in embracing a dialogue with someone engaged in a more and more discredited profession these days, as the endless stories of abuse roll on. I imagine some of your friends counselling you to consider seriously before taking on a correspondent who has all the breathless appeal of some sleazy drug dealer. The image might be a little strong of course, but you know what I mean.

  I hope you realise how good it was to spend time with you—little though it was. I feel quite powerful connections. I am gripped by the turns in the journey, and all that has happened since Easter. Hope I can keep up with this pilgrim who has fallen into stride with me. I find you a delightfully easy person to feel ‘at home’ with.

  Thanks.

  Tony

  Hello again, Antonio!

  I’m in another world. I drove from the airport up to our shack in the country to meet Peter. We are now sweltering in 30-plus heat with impossibly large flocks of cockatoos an
d crows overhead. We’re perplexed, never having seen such numbers of them in our 23 years of coming here. Maybe there is something dead nearby, or maybe it’s the three years of good rains that have changed the countryside and made it more delectable to birds, ’roos and all wildlife. There are even more snakes about this year. I’ve seen one almost every weekend recently when I’ve been out striding.

  Anyway, aside from the squawks of birds and the cicadas chirruping, all is quiet. Oh, no—there’s the clunk-clunk of a wooden wind chime, souvenir of a trip to Bali twenty years ago, back in the days before fake designer watches.

  Silence sprawls. It’s both settling and unsettling after the swirl of faces that was—and always is—my experience of Sydney.

  ‘Compañero.’

  Yes, you have it in one! Com—‘with’. Pan—‘bread’. It’s our English word, companion, of course. Something much deeper and more tribal than amigo, in my lexicon. I use amigo of many people—and in the case of the amigo in my book, it was used consciously to remind me and readers that he was ‘friend’ and not amante—‘lover’. Sometimes a label can help, you know. But ‘compañero’ has music in it, and that notion of breaking bread suggests time and silence spent together, something deeper and of the spirit. And yes, I’m aware of the biblical overtone and am very peaceful with it.

  So. Compañero . . .

  There you are!

  Labels and names are particularly tricky in the area of relationship, I think. Once, ‘companion’ was a euphemism for lover, particularly for gay couples. Now we scoff at it as old-fashioned or coy, but in some ways I think it is perfect. I certainly prefer it to partner. Or to ‘wife’, now I think of it. That can have overtones of ownership, though mercifully, my marriage has never had any sense of that for me. ‘Companion’ has resonances that appeal enormously.

  ‘Friend’ seems to me to be the greatest compliment one can give anyone. I believe it comes from a Germanic root, which it shares with the word ‘free’, and the meaning of the root word is ‘to love’. I used to say that if I could choose my epitaph it would read ‘She was a good friend’. Peter and I are friends—we are companion-able together, too. I’m proud of that. We can share silence, and I travel more easily with him than with anyone else—sure signs!